"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

-Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt, in the Washington Post

"A long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East.... This has so far been a year of heartening surprises--each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing."

-New York Times editorial
"More-aggressive U.S. policies in the Middle East--from the invasion of Iraq to President Bush's rhetoric about fostering democracy--are mingling with local politics to jostle once-unquestioned realities in the region."

-Wall Street Journal news story
"As thousands of Arabs demonstrated for freedom and democracy...it was hard not to wonder whether the regional transformation that the Bush administration hoped would be touched off by its invasion of Iraq is beginning to happen.... Those who have declared the war an irretrievable catastrophe have been gloating for at least a year over the supposed puncturing of what they portray as President Bush's fanciful illusion that democracy would take root in Iraq and spread through the region.... Clearly the Arab autocrats don't regard the Bush dream of democratic dominoes as fanciful.... Less than two years after Saddam Hussein was deposed...Arabs are marching for freedom and shouting slogans against tyrants in the streets of Beirut and Cairo--and regimes that have endured for decades are visibly tottering. Those who claimed that U.S. intervention could never produce such events have reason to reconsider."

-Washington Post column by Jackson Diehl

*****

The bandwagon is starting to fill--and thank goodness for that...

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...Today's snobs are just the latest in a long train of doubters of ordinary citizens. Almost 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln battled such men while campaigning for the Senate. In a speech that has been wonderfully preserved in handwritten form, with Lincoln's spoken emphases underlined by him in ink (and replicated in the extract below) the first Republican President said this:

Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of the equal rights of men...Ours began by affirming those rights.

They said some men are too ignorant and vicious to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and by your system, you would always keep them ignorant and vicious.

We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant wiser, and all better, and happier together.

That's a pointed endorsement of the power of democratic self-responsibility to elevate both individuals and societies. And it's as relevant to today's Middle East as it was to slaveholding America.

Of course, good everyday citizens will only raise their hands if someone first suppresses the bullies in their midst. The reason reformers in the Middle East are finally coming out of the woodwork is because, as a Washington Post column recently acknowledged, "the new U.S. democratization policy, far from being an unwanted imposition, has given them a voice, an audience, and at least a partial shield against repression--three things they didn't have a year ago." Which brings us to our third set of heroes: U.S. fighting forces...

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Had to add this:

Of course, good everyday citizens will only raise their hands if someone first suppresses the bullies in their midst. The reason reformers in the Middle East are finally coming out of the woodwork is because, as a Washington Post column recently acknowledged, "the new U.S. democratization policy, far from being an unwanted imposition, has given them a voice, an audience, and at least a partial shield against repression--three things they didn't have a year ago." Which brings us to our third set of heroes: U.S. fighting forces.

In the Middle East, as in most places where democracy has taken root, the ballot inspectors, television commentators, cajoling politicians, and buzzing new parliaments were all preceded by a vital prerequisite: some good men with rifles. In this case, good men from places like Mohrsville, Pennsylvania; Stockton, California; Round Rock, Texas; and Saranac Lake, New York. All the lilting speeches and learned counsel, the grand plans and inspiring coalitions are just will-o'-the-wisps until someone brave does the difficult duty of establishing the ground rules of liberty. Let us never forget that peace and freedom start with superior firepower.

There is little grandeur in that work. No one gets wealthy doing it. Some of the servicemen have only a hazy notion of the deeper stakes they are fighting for.

But those who reported for duty, including many who suffered and died, are now being paid in the transcendent coin of having created one of history's turning points. Look again at the cover of this magazine. That simple flat map depicts tens of millions of human lives in the process of radical transformation. Those black voids represent dark breeding grounds of terror and economic destruction and mass homicide--and nearly every one of them is now in the process of brightening. This we owe to our GIs.

Many others are in their debt as well. Though his words got little attention from the U.S. media, who are more interested in morbidity and failure, new Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke for millions of people around the globe when he said this at his inauguration on December 7, 2004:

Whatever we have achieved in Afghanistan--the peace, the election, the reconstruction, the life that the Afghans are living today in peace, the children going to school, the businesses, the fact that Afghanistan is again a respected member of the international community--is from the help that the United States of America gave us. Without that help, Afghanistan would be in the hands of terrorists--destroyed, poverty-stricken, and without its children going to school or getting an education. We are very, very grateful, to put it in the simple words that we know, to the people of the United States of America for bringing us this day.

Please. It's duped Arabs in combination with the Jewish-American govermedia. Arabs don't like democracy. They like autocracy. And when they're given a chance to vote, they vote Islam. That's something the neocons didn't count on, but who am I to question their wisdom. They, of course, have all the power. I just complain about them on the Internet.

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